The Old Stagedriver’s Yosemite Yarns (1962) by Laurence Degnan and Douglass Hubbard

MCCAULEY’S CHICKEN

DID YOU EVER hear the story about McCauley’s
famous chicken?” As he spoke the
driver pulled a faded newspaper clipping from
his pocket. “I can’t tell the story half as well
as Derrick Dodd. He was a writer on the San
Francisco Post and a first class yarn-spinner.
This is what he had to say about looking down
from Glacier Point back in 1882:

‘It is something to stop the beating of
a chamois’ heart to lean over the iron
railing set between two verge-topping
boulders on the peak’s brink, and glance
down into the bottomless, awful gulf below.
It causes spiders of ice to crawl down
one’s spine, and the hair of one of the
party, whose hat happened to be off, as
he bent over the rail, suggested an actor
pulling the string of a “fright wig” in a
minstrel ghost scene.

As a part of the usual programme, we
experimented as to the time taken by
different objects in reaching the bottom
of the cliff. An ordinary stone tossed
over remained in sight an incredibly long
time, but finally vanished somewhere
about the middle distance. A handkerchief
with a stone tied in the corner, was
visible perhaps a thousand feet deeper,
but even a large empty box watched by a
field glass could not be traced to its concussion
with the valley floor. Finally the
landlord appeared on the scene, carrying
an antique hen under his arm. This, in
spite of the terrified ejaculations and entreaties
of the ladies, he deliberately
threw over the cliff’s edge. A rooster
might have gone thus to his doom in stoic
silence but the sex of this unfortunate
bird asserted itself the moment it started
on its awful journey into space. With an
ear-piercing cackle that grew gradually
fainter as it fell, the poor creature shot
downward, now beating the air with ineffectual
wings, and now frantically clawing
at the very wind, that slanted her first
this way and then that, the hapless fowl
shot down, down, until it became a mere
fluff of feathers no larger than a quail.
Then it dwindled to a wren’s size, disappeared,
then again dotted the sight a moment
as a pin’s point, and then—it was
gone.

After drawing a long breath all round,
the women folks pitched into the hen’s
owner with redoubled zest. But the genial
McCauley shook his head knowingly, and
replied: “Don’t be alarmed about that
chicken, ladies. She’s used to it. She goes
over that cliff every day during the season!”

And, sure enough, on our way back we
met the old hen about half way up the
trail, calmly picking her way home. Then
only did we realize that we had been
wasting our sympathy on an ironclad
spring chicken of the regular Palace Hotel
breed.”